Competitive athletes and their trainers and coaches have always sought to develop training regimens and exercises to maximize athletic performance in particular sports, but objective testing and evaluation in a manner that can identify specific neuromuscular and muscular deficiencies in a manner that enables targeted development of specific training regimens to maximize athletic performance for individual athletes in specific sports has been lacking. Each person has different or unique physical characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses that may not necessarily be addressed and optimized by generalized exercise programs.
Some efforts have been made, of course, to test and address needs of individual athletes, such as the functional sports screening tests which are used with many athletes. A relatively comprehensive list of many of the functional sports screening tests has been compiled by the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM), of 26632 Agoura Road, Calabasas, Calif. 91302, and the functional movement screening test developed by Gray Cook and described in his book Athletic Body in Balance, by Gray Cook, published by Human Kinetics, 2003. The functional movement screen discussed by Gray Cook, which includes squat, step lunge, reach, leg raise, push-up, and rotational movements, addresses the mobility and stability of the body and stresses the importance of overall body balance. Gray Cook further stresses the need for overall body balance and the desire that the right and left side of the body maintain a balanced muscular performance profile. Such functional movement screening observation of the movements necessitates that a trainer/coach or the athlete himself or herself interpret and grade or score the relative performance of the athlete/subject on the various exercise movements on a scale from 0 for complete failure to 3 for complete success for each movement. Thus, the functional screening is somewhat subjective in that it is subject to the opinion of the coach/trainer, and it is difficult to have repeatable results between different coaches/trainers. The NASM functional sports screening tests, on the other hand, are measurements of the athlete/subject in sporting skills such as the 40 yard dash, the 300 meter shuttle run, and number pull-ups, thus measuring the final performance of an athlete/subject in a sports context, but not the individual muscle groups. The NASM tests also address things such as body mass/weight measurements and other more subjective tests such as a postural assessment.